When Duriel Harris isn’t busy with her teaching, she is hard at work writing and performing poetry. Harris, an assistant professor of English, was recently named a Fellow of the Pan African Literary Forum, a weeklong workshop that will be held in Ghana in the summer of 2008.

A distinguished and celebrated poet, Harris has been a guest lecturer at Sarah Lawrence College and Adelphi University.  Her poetry has been featured in numerous journals and anthologies.  Her book, Drag, is a compilation of her poetry – a talent and a passion that she discovered as an undergraduate at Yale University.

Harris is also a talented musician.  Since 2001, she has been performing with Douglas Ewart and Inventions, a Chicago-based jazz ensemble.  The band intends to release an album in the fall, titled Velvet Fire.  In performance, Harris shares her poetry, in true improvisational form.  One of three female vocalists in the band, she also plays percussion instruments, ranging from the cabasa to agogo bells. 

Harris’s relationship with sound is reflected in her research.  She is working on “AMNESIAC,” a media art project that will include a book-length poetry collection, DVD, a Web site and sound recording.  “I am exploring narrative, linguistic, graphic and performative textuality in the effort to create poems that are paradigms for and means of recovery from traumatic memory loss,” says Harris.

Harris received her M.A. from New York University and the Ph.D. from the University of Illinois.  She says graduate study gave her the opportunity to connect with other artists, broadening her horizons and opening the doors to a new world of creativity.

Harris is as passionate about teaching as she is about music and poetry. “It’s been rewarding to build relationships through the collective experience of grappling with ideas,” she says.  As a poet, musician and professor, “I hope to continuously outshine myself and to keep growing,” Harris proclaims.